So the blink-and-you-miss-it summer break is over and football is back with an all-consuming vengeance. Despite the new season hardly having had time to clear its throat, it is already spewing headlines like a TV newsbar gone postal. And that is just in England.

If, as seems universally accepted, eggs is indeed eggs, then the only other certainty in an increasingly troubled world is that Alastair Cook will eviscerate every English batting record, apart possibly from the highest individual score.

Strange to be writing about sport when outside it feels like Salem, where vengeful witchfinders prowl the highways and byways of the media and political landscape looking for someone or something,
anything, to burn; where screeching harpies of press and internet call for the closure of papers they don’t like; and where sanctimonious preachers declaim from their leader columns that the
intolerant consensus of the left must rule.